Young Adult Literature: Coming of Age and Bildungsroman

Titles Discussed

The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton

Just Listen by Sarah Dessen

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

Genre Overview

In its broadest contemporary use, bildungsroman refers to a coming-of-age novel in which an adolescent protagonist experiences moral, psychological, and often physical maturation on the journey to adulthood. When the term was first coined in Germany in 1819, however, it referenced a much more formulaic plot in which a sensitive teenage boy (often an orphan) leaves a rural life in order to strike out on his own in a city. There, he feels excluded from society but, through the help of an older friend, learns to find his place in the world, emerging at the novel's end as a full adult.

Particularly because of the focus on teenage protagonists, it is no surprise that bildungsromans have often been popular among young adult readers through generations—including many classics of twentieth-century literature, such as Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) and J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951). The modern young adult genre, as it is commonly understood, began around the publication of S. E. Hinton's 1967 bildungsroman The Outsiders. Published when Hinton was only seventeen, it tells the story of a young gang member's maturation in a gritty and violent world. Following The Outsiders, increasing attention was placed on young adult publishing by both publishers and authors, and as such the number of bildungsromans written specifically for young adult readers increased sharply.

The bildungsroman remains popular in the twenty-first century. It is important to note, however, that not all young adult novels fit into this categorization, despite the fact that almost all young adult novels feature teenage protagonists during the mental and physical formation process. Rather, it is the emergence into adulthood and the concomitant change in self-identity that typically define the genre. Almost every other qualification from that earliest definition has fallen away. Modern bildungsromans are as interested in young women as young men, for instance, and the sense of “successfully” entering society is less important as young adult fiction increasingly celebrates characters for their differences from, rather than similarities to, others. It is because of this evolution that novels like Sarah Dessen's Just Listen (2006) and Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl (2013) stand as acclaimed works in the bildungsroman genre.

Works

Hinton's The Outsiders has arguably had a greater impact on the development of modern young adult literature than any other novel, in large part because it established the first real young adult market through its honest depictions of the young protagonist's life—violence, obscene language, and teenage smoking and alcohol consumption are all present, despite being taboo subjects at the time. These honest depictions are also integral to the success of the novel as a bildungsroman, as the societal problems shape the protagonist's maturation.

The main character, Ponyboy, begins the narrative as a fourteen-year-old gang member, raised by his two older brothers after their parents' death in a car crash. Tough beyond his years, over the course of the novel, his gang of poor teenagers, the Greasers, comes into conflict with a gang of wealthier teenagers, the Socs, and the battles between the two lead to several deaths and serious injuries. While Ponyboy at one point collapses in a nervous state, exhausted from the constant violence and danger, he eventually returns to school, where he decides the important thing is to write down the story he has experienced.

Ponyboy does not emerge at the end of the story as a full adult, yet he experiences significant psychological maturation. Since that change is the primary focus of the novel, The Outsiders fits firmly into the subgenre of entwicklungsroman, a bildungsroman in which the protagonist comes shy of reaching adulthood. Hinton emphasizes his growth through a significant narrative device—rather than being simply a first-person narration, the ending reveals that the novel is in fact the text that Ponyboy sets down to write in order to process the violence he has experienced, with the final line of the novel also serving as its first. Because of this narrative choice, Ponyboy is able to explore his original feelings as the events occurred while also hinting at the growth he experiences and his altered perception from the other side of the violence. When he first meets the Socs, for instance, he assumes that their higher economic class indicates a lack of problems in their lives, yet he tells the readers that he was wrong in that same moment. As the two gangs become entwined in violence and he sees them acting out of the same confusion and desperation as the Greasers, he ultimately comes to feel empathy for and finally camaraderie with them, fulfilling the change in perspective first foreshadowed with his admission of misjudgment.

In the end, then, it is the writing by Ponyboy of The Outsiders and the turn to literature that allows him to grow out of the violent trap of the gangs. While the earliest bildungsromans would have ended with Ponyboy as a functional member of liberal society, this more modern entwicklungsroman resists that happy ending. It is the growth that matters most, and while readers hope Ponyboy will find a happier and safer life for himself at some point, the focus on the novel itself (and the return to its opening with that final repeated line) directs readers' attention not to the end result of Ponyboy's change, but to the ongoing process of change itself.

The possibilities opened up by the realism and candor of The Outsiders helped make books like Just Listen possible. At the novel's start, Annabel is entering her junior year of high school and finds herself isolated and withdrawn: at school, she has been ostracized by her best friend Sophie, and at home, her sister struggles with an eating disorder while her mother constantly pushes Annabel toward a modeling career she does not desire. Annabel slowly makes friends with another loner and, through the friendship and time with a therapist, begins to talk about the fact that Sophie's boyfriend raped her. When the boyfriend rapes another girl, Annabel gathers the strength to speak at his trial. Soon after, she finds herself more and more comfortable at home and at school, her relationships stronger when she can honestly share her struggles.

As with The Outsiders, it is the telling of a difficult experience that marks a significant change for the protagonist and narrator, as Annabel's therapist encourages her to write her life story in order to make sense of it. Once again, this provides a narrative distance in which change takes place. At first, Annabel is unable to write about the rape, then after writing it she is unable to tell it to others, and finally, after sharing with loved ones, she gains the strength to speak publicly about what happened. This telling is also a mark of her growing process, with the Annabel of the opening pages a reserved person who believes she must make it entirely on her own in the world, and the Annabel of the ending a young woman who has learned to rely on other people and to see her problems as both personal challenges and aspects of society at large. The Annabel of the modern bildungsroman enters a society that is flawed–—both a solution to and a cause of her problems—but that she is also invested in changing.

Rowell's novel Fangirl similarly tracks a withdrawn young woman who emerges into a social world, although for the protagonist Cath, writing first serves as an escape from that reality rather than a way to truly communicate with others. Cath is a first-year college student who excels as a writer of fan fiction based on a fantasy novel series, Simon Snow, earning countless online admirers for her work. However, she struggles to leave her room for anything but classes, overwhelmed with social anxiety. She encounters other social problems that are common in young adult novels after The Outsiders, including her twin sister's alcohol abuse and the reality of her mother abandoning the family years ago. Overall, Cath's struggles are much more internal, with the possibility of new friends and a crush eventually drawing her out of her imagined world and into the social and academic life of her university.

Rowell emphasizes the divide between Cath's interior world of imagination and childlike fancy and the exterior, adult world of the college by inserting brief excerpts from Simon Snow novels as well as occasional excerpts of Cath's fan fiction. The tension created between these narratives suggests the differences between them (the problems of her twin's alcohol abuse, for instance, seem more urgent when compared to the escapism of the fantasy series). The binary of Simon Snow and university life, then, is a clear reflection of the bildungsroman binary of adolescence and adult life, with Cath's task being the migration from one to the other. Just as importantly, however, Fangirl operates as a Künstlerroman, another subgenre of the bildungsroman in which the protagonist develops as an artist as well as an adult. As Cath struggles in her fiction-writing course throughout the novel, the success of her final short story is significant in that it is also one of her first attempts to write original fiction instead of stories set in the Simon Snow universe.

Cath's academic and social successes—acquiring a boyfriend around the same time she finishes her final story—dovetail to show the interconnected nature of each. She has entered an adult life fully, her concerns turned away from imagination and the interior and pointing outward toward the questions and concerns of the broader world, all to the benefit of her emotional health and her art. While Ponyboy in his entwicklungsroman has not fully reached this level of societal engagement by the end of his novel, the fact that he has started to tell his story to others is the first sign of this ongoing process. While all of these protagonists, then, have entered society in the literary tradition of the bildungsroman, in the modern tradition of the young adult novel initiated by Hinton, these societies are themselves imperfect, the characters not saved by others, but rather able to see themselves as people both changed by and capable of changing their flawed worlds.

Conclusions

Considering its long importance in Western literary traditions and its clear overlap with young adult literature, the bildungsroman has a firmly established place in both the publishing and education worlds. Young adult readers are quick to pick up books that feature characters experiencing similar challenges that they face on a daily basis, and the endless complexities of the transition to adulthood provide ample subject matter for authors and critics alike.

In fact, nearly all of the most popular and critically acclaimed young adult novels of the twenty-first century reflect some qualities of the bildungsroman, including massive best sellers such as the Harry Potter fantasy series by J. K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series. Since publication of the Harry Potter books spanned about ten years, many young fans of the book could have spent their entire adolescence reading them, experiencing their own real-world coming-of-age stories parallel to the characters in the books.

At the same time, societal ideas about adulthood and the boundary between childhood and adulthood have continued to change. Innovations in social media, shifting timelines for first careers and financial independence, and other twenty-first-century factors drastically alter what it means to be a young adult entering adult society in the contemporary world. Just as the bildungsroman has evolved from the story of a sensitive young boy leaving home to make it on his own in the city into the diverse novels of young adults entering and changing the social landscape, the genre will certainly evolve alongside its multifaceted society in the near future, earning the attention of both teenage and adult readers along the way.

Bibliography

Noomé, Idette. “Shaping the Self: A Bildungsroman for Girls?” Literator 25.3 (2004): 125–49. Literary Reference Center. Web. 8 Apr. 2015. <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=18587956&site=lrc-live>.

Trites, Roberta Seelinger. Disturbing the Universe: Power and Representation in Adolescent Literature. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2000. Print.

Bibliography

Boyle, Brendan. “The Bildungsroman after McDowell: Mind, World, and Moral Education.” Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism 69.2 (2011): 173–84. Academic Search Premier. Web. 8 Apr. 2015. <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=vth&AN=60313852&site=ehost-live&scope=site>.

Castle, Gregory. Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2006. Print.

Jones, Leisha. “Contemporary Bildungsromans and the Prosumer Girl.” Criticism 53.3 (2011): 439–69. Literary Reference Center. Web. 8 Apr. 2015. <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=69713568&site=lrc-live>.